ares, asleep
by irishais
Summary: He will forever be at war. Seifer, and the witches.


**i.**

The stars are out tonight.

He revels in them, breathes them deep into his lungs, holding them there until they implode into ancient light and dust. The view from the arch is spectacular, impossible- below him, the world flickers, stuttering like a television left on past midnight, when the programming runs out and disappears into static noise.

It's like he's woken up _inside _that static, enveloped in it, filling his eyes and his ears and his mind.

The stars are out tonight.

One by one, they blink away, until the white-noise of the world is all that remains, threatening up to the darkness above, an inky carpet that he reaches for. His fingertips come back coated in it; Seifer turns his hand left, right. It flows down his arm, the gray of his coat eclipsed in it. The next second, it is gone, and all that remains dark is his battered glove wrapped around the hilt of Hyperion.

The view from the arch is spectacular, impossible; Deling City doesn't sleep, and yet it dreams, yearning, gaping, _hungry_.

Her hand is at his back, midnight feral between his shoulder blades.

He leaps without the inevitable push.

The concrete rushes up to him, shatters beneath the impact of his boots. When he looks back up, up, her face is a plum-venom smile, the feathers around her face whispering in the breeze. _Go. Destroy_.

He goes, and his gunblade follows suit, the bodies cleaving apart beneath a bright-keen edge. Go. Destroy. Hyperion sticks in a young woman's rib cage, her hands nerveless and clawing at the flat of the blade anyway, desperate to wake up, this isn't happening-

One heavy black-soled boot plants itself in her sternum, and Seifer wrenches the gunblade free, taking most of her lungs with it, viscera painting the sidewalk like ambitious graffiti. His mark is made, and her corpse becomes its punctuation.

Go. Destroy.

Hyperion, in lazy wide sweeping arcs, a practiced twist of his wrist- no one is safe from him tonight, when the wolf has been set loose. He grins, all white-teeth nightmare; in the next stroke, an old man's head is separated from cardigan-wrapped shoulders, a child screams in the flames that burst up from patent-leather shoes.

Oh, yes, the wolf is out tonight, and the stars are no longer there to judge him, to cast their bright and baleful eye upon the monster in the streets.

He carves a bloody swath through the city, until dawn creeps above the horizon, the sun a balm on his stained-scarlet skin. Seifer turns his face up toward the east, tracking its path. The arch is illuminated, the presidential palace beyond.

He goes as if summoned. Hyperion rests, sated, dripping. The sorceress waits for him, dark plumage, whispering black velvet. There is a soft jingle of the metal on her headdress, and her horns threaten to gore as she comes close enough to touch. Seifer's chest tightens, breathing hard until her nails carve along the angular lines of his cheek. Her thumb swipes across his mouth. He tastes blood, with its burnt copper scent. It doesn't belong to him.

The touch is too intimate- Seifer will one day pretend that he doesn't lean into it, seeking the approval that she offers. He has done all she asked. He will do _everything _she asks. Her palm is soft. The scent of seaside reaches his nose, sunshine and wildflowers fighting the encroaching rush of sand that threatens to swallow a garden by the water with every tide, the feeling of baking-warm stone against a thin child's back, respite from play and chaos, the cool pull of sweet lemonade through a plastic straw-

**ii.**

the stars are dressed in clouds, fog rolling in across the water; he sucks down water from the bathroom tap in broad, shaking hands, spilling more of it than makes its way to his lips. His throat feels scorched, a firaga instead of a scream incinerating his vocal cords. There is no relief coming; he could stick his entire face beneath the faucet if it would fit, filling up his stomach with as much water as he could drink- he could _drown_ in the sink and he would still feel as if he were suffocating.

There is no touch at his back, no relief from the panic that wells up around him and tries to grind him down into a pile of ash.

Seifer turns, fumbles, wrenches on the shower with a squeaky half-turn of the knob.

The cold water helps nothing, but the bowie knife beneath his pillow when he tries to lay back down an hour later, soaked through and shivering in the air that comes through the open window, provides more by way of defense.

_you can't kill ghosts. _

He can fucking try.

Seifer stares out the window, past the drifting flutter of the curtain, searching for the moon and the forgiveness it might bring him. But there is nothing to see, no forgiveness to be found.

**iii.**

"I'm not afraid."

She laughs, malevolent merriment ringing around the palace throne room, delight in the sound that only means cruelty- happiness is a lie, a smile on that painted face as convincing as the bright bands of color on a venomous snake in the grass.

"Of _kourse_ you aren't afraid."

He fears nothing, he fears nothing at all- but when she sweeps toward him, her wings and dress streaming in her wake, Seifer thinks that might not be entirely correct. (He would be stupid not to be afraid of her.)

Her claws reach into his chest, passing through his flesh as easily as if it were a hallucination holding all his guts in; his heart stops entirely for one long moment as Ultimecia's claws wrap around it, reminding him just, _exactly, _who he serves, whom he _belongs _to.

The battle ends poorly for him, half-dead, half-torn apart. He lies bleeding, waiting for the gift of her cure, for a long time before he has to draw one off a corpse nearby for his own use, white magic funneling foreign into his body, knitting back the bits and pieces of himself he keeps trying so very hard to leave behind.

Not today.

She will be angry if he dies today.

She will be angry no matter what.

iv.

It is the middle of the night when he calls her, her number coming unbidden from his fingertips, the only one he's bothered to memorize outside of the Garden switchboard, initially written on the inside of a matchbook, subsequently lost. But he's a smart boy, has a good head on his shoulders for math and strategy- all his instructors said so, before they all turned their backs on him because he couldn't follow _orders_.

Her voice is sleep-strangled.

"Seifer?"

He doesn't know how to make her understand that the world is shifting again, that the static is in his bones now, that he doesn't know how to keep from drowning, doesn't know how to get back up again.

Mouth open, breath inhaled.

"- are you alright?"

To the quick beating heart of the matter with three words; he's not, he isn't, he doesn't know if he'll ever be _alright _again.

The call ends, one jab of a callused thumb on the red icon.

**v.**

he just wants to wake up.

(the light glints off a dancer's impossible costume, missiles scrawl a neat arc in the sky, _one day, _a boy dies, a man screams)

please, let him wake up.


End file.
